Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center has created this site as a resource for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Designed to help policymakers, students, and interested citizens draw lessons from these critical events half a century ago, this site not only provides background on the crisis that brought the world to the brink of nuclear disaster in October 1962 but also offers tools to understand how it can inform contemporary policy.

David Barrett

“Keep open the lines of communication to the mavericks, to the iconoclasts who approach matters in a different way. In the Kennedy administration, it was McCone.”

Lesson: Employ multiple viewpoints, including iconoclastic ones, in decision-making process.

David Barrett, “Interview with Jeff Gammage: The Truth about the Cuban Missile Crisis” (Philadelphia Inquirer, 10/26)